Certainty Bias Part 2: How Certain Can We Be?

 

 October 31, 2025  

Image: Pixabay

 

“We need to take insights more seriously.  Improving performance depends on reducing errors but it also depends on increasing insights.  If we eliminate all errors, we still haven’t generated any new and innovative ideas…. Sure, we need to worry about making bad judgments.  But we also should celebrate our capacity for insights.”                   --Gary Klein, Snapshots of the Mind (2022)

 

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” 

 -- Carl Jung

                                               

The human brain is a binary thinking system, meaning we think in black and white. Our brains are most alert to contrasts and extremes:  good versus bad, win or lose, like or dislike, on or off, yes or no; the brain thinks in extremes before nuances or ranges. 

“Safe or dangerous?” is the survival question meant to sharpen our instincts and alarm us to flee, freeze, or fight. It is built into our first impressions of people new to us. First impressions guide our immediate behavior, acting as snapshots to trip split-second decisions, not long-term planning.  We overrate small risks and small chances in the quest for total assurance, the basis for the structured (advance) settlement business, which pays out money awards today rather than over the span of years, quickly but at far less their face value (Daniel Kahneman, 2011).  We favor a smaller loss over a much larger gain that also carries the greater loss potential.  The male mind has a higher risk tolerance than the female. 

Epistemic certainty

Epistemic certainty (from study of knowledge, epistemology) is rational and logical, distinguished from psychological certainty, which is subjective—person-based, not provable, and an aspect of belief, not knowledge.  A strong feeling of certainty does not guarantee any truth value, but is highly motivational as an article of identity and perception ability. 

Epistemic facts are core truths so well established—like math principles—that they can’t be challenged until some enterprising thinker ventures outside their sealed box.  Such knowledge is beyond sensory experience, supportable by evidence, justifiable by expert credentials, and is consistent with other truths.  Examples are 2+2 = 4, triangles have three sides, and a doctor’s diagnosis based on test results.  No remote viewing or other classified pseudoscience.

These truths also form an implicit bias, unrecognized because so ingrained, but objective and provable beyond question.  If all knowledge were this agreed-on, conflicts would not come from differing visions of agreed-on truth.  These are the absolutes that provide a sense of security and offer conflict avoidance.  However, the well-guarded secret within professions is that even armed with established facts, judges make different decisions based on a range of factors (is the trial before or after lunch?), as do lawyers, doctors, professors, engineers, appraisers, and religious leaders.

Certainty-seeking

The human bias toward 100%-certain outcomes is a known fact of behavioral psychology. We want things to be absolute, locked and certain, within the past as well as in forecasting the future.  Going for such absolute assurance, however, can prove costly to opportunities and success.

A colleague of mine has mentioned that he would be glad to compete for professional prizes and awards, but with a caveat: as a precondition, he’d need to be assured in advance that he had already won.  (He really said this.)  He then declared that this lack of certainty was the reason he never competed in any available contests.  I remarked that I couldn’t think of many honest contests that operated that way.  There are no guarantees.  Life isn’t designed to work that way.  Uncertainty is the rule—and people try to fight it all the time.

Such is the ultimate state everyone everywhere lives within. And the problem is not that information is scarce or incomplete.  It’s that our perception and processing are biased, and that our biased lenses distort whatever they behold.  We have to get off our own viewing stand to know what we are actually observing.  But this introspective correction is difficult even for experts in decision-making science. 

We are the only species that is all too aware that we are going to die.  That is true certainty;  that no matter how long the lifetime, no one gets out alive.  However, this isn’t a truth that’s easily lived with; the death prospect is profoundly innervating and a major depression pitfall.  How do we deal with this reality?  “Maybe,” in the absence of any certainty about the timing of death, “we should just assume that we’re going to live a long time,” says neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi.  Maybe acting immortal is the answer to having no answers about mortality—the ultimate extension of the “unskilled and unaware” study showcasing the widespread illusion of overconfidence.

Isn’t the immortality assumption both deluded and uncannily useful to the purposes of living a confident and fulfilled life?  Psychologist Gary Klein’s statement puts this illusion in profile:  “Similarly, I think we need a positive cognitive psychology that appreciates the sources of power people use to make sense of complex and dynamic situations” (2022).

Our need for cognitive closure leads to an illusion of validation and control that so often lands us in trouble of our own, by avoiding losses (we think) but taking unjustified risks driven by emotion rather than reasoning.  Our common need to be certain limits growth, learning, and personal development.  Biasing the brain by needing to be right, we are often led to be wrong.  But this need is systematic and knowable. Our overestimation of our own skills (the Dunning-Kruger effect) can be readily disproven at the first encounter with a more skilled individual or reviewing the corrected math-test answer sheet.  Or by the beginning driver who discovers quickly that he doesn’t have the experience needed to avoid a fender-bender.  Most drivers will swear, however, that their skills are above average.

A useful fiction

But this is a useful fiction.  Overconfidence serves the purpose of providing a reliable illusion of competence, one that allows people to function under the guise that they are more skilled than they are. In the absence of real-time testing, this can work.  This fiction, though, cannot serve its ego-ramping purpose when skill and knowledge are put to work, and where results can be tested, as on the freeway for a driver new to the road.  It is a mental construct, a personal vision that operates as a self-serving device.  One that doesn’t always work that well.  

Add to the issues of unskilled and unaware the unstable nature of our memory of everything.  Vividness is no indication that a memory records actual events, to be taken as evidence of what actually took place, or can act as proof of anything.  Our recollections are a gallery of impressions in a constant state of editing, enhancement, cutting, and re-filming.  Dreams are even more fantastic, but we recognize them as personal visions with weak ties to outer facts.  But then we talk about following our “dreams,” same word,  as a working life plan.

“The standard for decision-making is the courtroom, when it comes to taking people’s liberty, reputation, resources, and even their life, is not ‘certainty.’  It is ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.  Judges even remind jurors that it is impossible to prove or know anything with total certainty” (Trey Gowdy, Start, Stay, or Leave, The Art of Decision-Making, (2023), p. 58.  “Waiting until you are certain is going to be a long wait.” 

The courtroom scenario is a key case study of testing knowledge and the way we measure that knowledge.  So are other critical life events: choosing a career, a college, a living location, even a car, and especially a significant other.  All are big-ticket choices with long-term consequences, and each requires weighting knowledge to decide which data points are the most relevant to the decision.  But remember that the main driver of decision-making (the more important the decision, the more powerful the drive) is the whole brain, which operates on emotional affect.  Rational thought is just an irregular subset. Art, not science, rules the mind. 

 

Certainty Bias Part 1: Overconfidence

 

Certainty Bias Part 1: Overconfidence 

 

Image: Pexels

 “Once {Chief Inspector Morse} got an idea stuck firmly in his brain, something cataclysmic was needed to dislodge it….He wondered, as he often wondered, whether he had made the right decision.  And once more, he told himself, he had.”

-- Colin Dexter, Inspector Morse series, Last Seen Wearing (1976)

Certainty bias                                                               

Certainty bias refers to the higher weight given to 100%-sure outcomes versus outcomes that risk lower probability but yield a higher payoff: 85% chance of winning $100 with a 15% risk of winning nothing, compared to the certainty of a $35 prize.  Most will take the $35.

We would rather be sure than become richer. Related is confirmation bias—the need to look at all information as a boost to preexisting beliefs to fill the need for validation. The control illusion overestimates our ability and underestimates obstacles, time, and expense, as well as judging how well we are going to be able to regulate our own motivations and goal-oriented energy. 

Certainty bias origin of overconfidence

The Dunning-Kruger effect comes out of a study of self-judging one’s ability – biased up and down the intelligence scale.  Individuals with low knowledge of a domain nevertheless far overestimate their own competence in that field, rating those abilities higher than higher-competence peers, who actually underestimate their skills. Finding: limited knowledge also impairs self-knowledge or metacognition, especially of one’s limitations.  The downward spiral heads lower as ignorance leads to further mis-calculation of ability.  (“Unskilled and Unaware,” 1999) This need for a positive confidence self-assessment is therefore self-reinforcing of a certain knowledge that has no core basis.  It is perhaps the classic case of overconfidence from laboratory studies.  And sets up subjects as the unreliable narrators of their own characters. 

At the far opposite end of this scale of self-deception is the world of Carol Dweck in her Mindset study (2006).   Her model proposes a way to reframe the anxiety of uncertainty by seeing opportunities for learning experiences as a form of skill development.  Shifting the focus “from proving to improving,” this positive framework allows people to embrace the unknown without fear, assuring themselves with a constant-improvement life plan for behavior.  Their quality of performance becomes a development project, not a goal of 100% perfection.

In a world of breakneck change, uncertainty tolerance if not embrace has become a new mental-health ruling.  The mind has to be retrained from valuing stability to distinguishing between what can and cannot be controlled or influenced.  Immediate closure isn’t possible or even desirable.  Openness takes on increased value.   

Neurologist Robert Burton, MD, has this to say in his book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (2008): 

I have set out to provide a scientific basis for challenging our belief in certainty. …Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice, nor even a thought process.  Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

Consider the problem of establishing the truth value of a memory.  What tells you that a memory is real, that it reflects lived experience, reliably recorded and stored?  Memory is notoriously unreliable as a truth document, because each time we access it, we change it in some way that we can’t later remember: this explains why eyewitness testimony is so slippery. And why the unchanging written record has enduring value. A vivid memory has no reliable truth value. Likewise, certainty is a feeling – from the emotional side of the think / feel dualism.  It is based on our sense of being right, not on the rational proof of rightness. 

Writing could be the preeminent arduous test of certainty.  So many decisions live in every passage and word choice, as well as idea capture.  As Oscar Wilde described the task, “I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.” So how does the writer know when what he is working on is “done”?  There are infinite ways to express any single thought; so how does any writing progress from draft to rearrangement of words to final copy?  There is no green light that appears when the writing task is “complete.”   Nothing but certainty bias to let the writer be sure that what has been written is “right.” 

There must be a sense of “this is the final draft” that emerges once the phrase or paragraph is as good as can be expected given the time limit and the writing’s purpose.  This is why I like to say that the most important piece of writing a college-bound student will ever produce (and under a 45-minute time clock) is the College Board Advanced Placement essay exam.

Another case of being sure:  A psychological experiment by Dr. Bruce Moseley featured a sham knee surgery, in which osteoarthritis patients with real complaints were “operated” on in a charade surgery, but no real incision made.  Afterwards these “sham” patients nevertheless reported successful outcomes, saying they were recovering well and their complaints were resolved.  Even after the real situation was revealed to them, patients nevertheless insisted the cure was successfully performed—cognitive dissonance in action.

Cognitive dissonance and memory distortion

A striking example of the unreliability of memory and the power of cognitive dissonance comes from an experiment conducted by psychologist Ulric Neisser following the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster. The day after the accident, Neisser asked over 100 students to document where they were and what they were doing when they first learned of the tragic event. More than two years later, he re-interviewed these students about the same experience. Surprisingly, approximately one in four students provided accounts that differed significantly from their original entries. Yet even when presented with the evidence of their own handwriting, many students insisted that their current recollection was correct. One student exemplified this reaction, saying, “That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.”

This phenomenon illustrates cognitive dissonance: the tendency to reinforce and defend incorrect information or beliefs rather than accept new, conflicting knowledge. Instead of using fresh evidence to correct uncertain or mistaken ideas, individuals may interpret it in a way that reaffirms what they already believe, even if those beliefs are inaccurate or outdated—called confirmation bias. This attachment to our perceived certainties can influence and distort subsequent perception and learning. As a result, people may choose to “know” things that are merely personal interpretations or entirely unpredictable events rather than remain open to uncertainty or withhold judgment in the face of ambiguity.

Certainty bias is at the opposite end of the range from awareness of our many errors in cognition—our collective ignorance of the many ways we can (and do) go wrong in the face of our longing for belief in a sure thing that can never let us down.  Does this give us any useful clues in understanding the origins of religion and an omniscient God?  Certainly.

 

Uncertainty as the Human Condition (Part 2)

 

Uncertainty as the Human Condition (Part 2)

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.  Uncertainty is the very condition to compel man to unfold his powers."

                                                                --Erich Fromm, social psychologist

Margaret J. Wheatley, management expert, had this to say about the effect of uncertainty on leadership and global politics: “I’m sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21^st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.”

Uncertainty means never having perfect information, or even anything approaching the information we want to be sure of in making decisions, especially those with long-term outcomes.  The disturbing truth about our choices is that we can never be sure we made the right one, or even a decent one.  And so, of course, our ability to learn from competing options is quite limited. Choices move around a flow chart, each new one dependent on previous choices. There may have been a much better field of options for any given choice, but what will ever remain unclear is whether, given the limited facts available about the choice, we chose the right ones to pay attention to.  At the same time, we also may be ignoring an entire set that was never even allowed into our line of sight. 

Businesses hate uncertainty and would rather take no action and make no investments in the face of it. A current example is the tariff mandates by the President, which change with each diplomatic negotiation.  No one knows how to price inputs and outputs.  No responsible manager can commit themselves to any kind of plan, even the briefest of holding actions, except for the default plan, which is inaction.  This uncertainty response gives the tariff initiative power to paralyze the entire economy.  This is one outcome, management expert Wheatley reports, of the fact that uncertainty has boosted leadership of the command-and control kind, which gives the illusion of assurance of knowledge, safety, and protection in unsure times.  In fact, its main outcome is more uncertainty.

We routinely rely on old information, bad assumptions, partial truths, or information that proves us right (confirmation bias), or on no research at all, but simply habits buried in time or custom or groupthink.  In addition, life doesn’t often give us the ability to do scientific research on our own beliefs and behavior.  There is no way to compare options not taken--because we can’t create a control that compares choices evenly based on lived experience—whether our choice of College A versus College B, of spouse A or B, or career choices, has delivered the better result.  We would need to live multiple lives to make this comparison work.

This is why, when a family friend asked me if I believed in the perfect soulmate being out there somewhere for each of us, I couldn’t give her an answer.  Her own husband, who she thought was so perfect, was her model for the ideal match.  But this wonderful guy could have been down the list of best choices—I didn’t want to break that news to her.  There is no way to show that she made the perfect or even best choice; there are just too many alternatives around.  However, she is forever certain that there was no other choice, that he was “the one” (especially now he’s deceased).   Unprovable, but likely to hold the key to much happiness.  All I could say was, “This is a more complex question than it appears.”  She was puzzled that I didn’t immediately agree with her romantic beliefs—and maybe thought I had given up on the game myself or had a shocking lack of beautiful ideals to live by.

Somehow every person must learn to live with the curse humans have always lived under:  lack of complete information, unsure outcomes for any situation, and the universality of the laws of change.  This is why the habitual college admissions prompt, “Describe a challenge you faced, what decision you had to make, and what you learned from it,” is such a thorny one to figure out.  We just have to take the track of the novelist and create an arc with an internal theme that seems logical or shows the logic of emotions.  The person who made the decision is also then a person changed by acting on that choice-- and so has a problem with objectively analyzing the outcome.

We become instantly attached to decisions we have already made, so that we can’t evaluate them with any objective fairness. Therefore not much can be learned from them—because the overtly successful ones don’t have much to tell us. Mistakes and bad calls carry more intelligence. So we learn little from success, an eternal conundrum that must be lived with in every moment.  While our future is a touchstone of hope, it is at the same time the wellspring of all our fears and the core of anxiety gnawing away at that hope. 

Uncertainty Bias and How to Cope (Part 1)

 

 

Uncertainty Bias and How to Cope (Part 1)

 

I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.

-- Richard P. Feynman, physicist

What is psychological uncertainty?

Uncertainty is the inability to make sense of, assign value to, or predict the outcomes of events (Charles Berger, about Uncertainty Reduction Theory).  Uncertainty takes away assurance, confidence, optimism, timely decision-making, and faith in the future.  It reduces ability to invest in a future that can’t be determined, well defined, or trusted. Berger’s work centers around mitigating these effects in order to allow a stable functioning life without chronic anxiety as the emotional theme. 

All self-management is an effort to prevent or stem uncertain outcomes, as all planning is intended to make life less uncertain.  Most of our time is spent anticipating, mitigating, managing, fearing, and combating our collective bias against being unable to predict the future. 

The late Dale E. Brashers, who developed Uncertainty Management Theory (2001) describes how uncertainty exists ”When details of situations are ambiguous, complex, unpredictable, or probabilistic; when information is unavailable or inconsistent; and when people feel insecure in their own state of knowledge or state of knowledge in general” Still, Brashers’ work took the theme that this condition is still manageable, using a “management by objective” approach to customize behaviors like avoidance, adapting, and support-seeking to individual needs – especially in the arena of uncertain health outcomes and their psychological dynamics.

Chronic anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the US today, affecting over 40 million adults, and more women than men.  The largest growth cohort is now the 15% of 18–25-year-olds, which doubled during the pandemic and is considered a public health crisis that must be addressed as such.  Cultural commentator David Brooks describes anxiety as “an unfocused form of fear,” manifested by worry and stress, anticipation of fearful events and situations that will prove beyond one’s coping ability.  The worldview stretches out into a future that is uncertain, unpredictable, unsure, insecure, and scary. 

The racing rate of change in events, understandings, and social relationships has increased the sensation of uncertainty in the past decades, creating a steady state of anxiety shared across generations, the age averaging younger by the year. For the cohort 21 to 60 years, work is an especially stressed environment, in competitive industries in particular, since employees spend the main part of their life as colleagues—even more time than is spent with friends and family.

There is survival value, however, in concern about potential problems—we have an inbuilt alarm system, fueled by an anxious imagination, that does prevent harm by making us naturally cautious about situations and decisions.  In short-term bursts, this mind-set protects us by making us vigilant.  But for many individuals, the price is an ongoing state of dread that saps our energy, growth, and ability to carry on in a sane and safe mode of operation.  The sad joke is that the overanxious woman tells her friends that her constant worrying actually prevents bad outcomes from happening.  “Worrying works!  More than 90% of the things I worry about never happen.”  And as a commentor on that claim could say, “Try telling my brain that!”

Certainty is an uncertain thing, but humans definitely need it.  We rely on our sense of certainty in every area: from global affairs to our relationships to our abilities to take on entirely new ways of thinking, or, with luck, and beat the house in Las Vegas.  Overconfidence in what we think we can be sure of is the core thinking and intuition bias, the one that drives all others.  We are so fixed on it that we risk making all sorts of errors in the name of the security of feeling sure.  We need a sense of certainty to make decisions – thousands of them in a month, major to minor.  Never mind that many will be unsuitable, unsafe, unsuccessful; we can always justify our thinking in hindsight.   It has even been shown that people prefer to receive bad news over no news because even unwelcome news can give the security of knowing where we stand, thus reducing anxiety.  Doomscrolling, the act of consuming negative news continuously, is an example of dopamine-seeking by confronting disturbing information. 

The problem is that we don’t just occasionally procrastinate, lash out, feel the loss of self-esteem, and realize we’re under too much control of the amygdala, the stress response center.  Rather than reset the brain once a direct threat has subsided, uncertainty anxiety becomes a chronic state, making the prefrontal cortex’s job, that of our higher brain function, more difficult.  Coping is compromised when so much energy and attention is pulled down to the more basic levels that deal with fear, focused on fear of an unknowable future state.  This endemic stress response is always “on,” and this mood is infectious, spreading through groups who begin to react anxiously to a wide radius of perceived threats with negative thinking, conflict acting, and toxic relating (see the latest gun news).  Very soon this begins to look like broad-based burnout, seen first in the workplace and home office where the best part of our time is spent.  

Lateral Thinking Principles

 

Lateral Thinking Principles                 

 

“If you want to think what nobody else thinks, ask a question that nobody else asks.” 

                                                                --Paul Sloane, lateral thinking expert

 

Lateral thinking is a problem-solving approach designed to encourage creative outside-the-box solutions to difficult problems.  Developed by Edward de Bono in the 1960s, it is based on four principles: recognizing assumptions and challenging dominant ideas; searching for alternatives (asking better questions; challenging assumptions, and generating innovative, non-logical solutions. 

Principles

Recognizing dominant ideas, or conventional ways of looking at problems, is the way to begin to see them in a new light—but the conventions need to be identified in order to steer around or away from them.  Searching for alternatives refers to finding new ways of seeing, so that problems can be redefined or defined within a novel context, one that may be quite distant from its ordinary surrounding assumptions. Challenging assumptions is when the ordinary thinking patterns can be left behind, as sub-optimal traps, by contrarian thinking.  An entirely unexpected point of view yields entirely new insights not available by conventional means.

This is because the usual ways of framing and breaking out of the frame in group thinking have been tried and found less than successful—merely extending existing assumptions isn’t the answer.  Generating novel solutions gives a new lease to open-mindedness in developing new thinking styles with a sharper turning ratio (this is the strength of the cheetah, angling its top speed as the fastest land animal).

The innovative, non-logical (non-vertical) solutions come from looking at the same problem from different angles, seemingly so different and distant that they can’t fit the problem at hand.  So the very nature of the problem is reconsidered across these four stages as well as, of course, novel options that can serve as solutions.  Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), says

Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that is not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one.  Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.

Here is an example of a lateral thinking question, based on minimal information:

 If Chinese men eat more rice than Japanese men, why is this true? 

Lateral questions 

Does this mean that each individual consumes more rice, or that the total number of people do?  There are many times more Chinese men than Japanese men (over 11 times more) – the aggregate number presents the simplest answer making the fewest assumptions.  Often in lateral thought (also called horizontal thinking), the most straightforward answer is the best one, bypassing more elaborate pre-assumptions.  Therefore, the lateral approach finds ways to escape thinking that is anchored in context, or a context we believe is necessary to both problem and solution.  In the best solution-finding, the anchor is a false security; only our thinking about its nature is limited.  Immediate circumstances, even if they exist only in the mind, constrain our thinking.  That narrowed thought process will constrain the solution—just when it doesn’t need to be constrained by vertical thinking but released from invisible barriers to yield a far superior resolution from the side.    

The nine-dot problem is a classic example.  The challenge is to connect with four straight lines every dot--without lifting your pencil or retracing any lines.  This puzzle is the classic think-outside-the-box example (see solution at the end).

Lateral thinking is the mainstay of working out solutions to hard-to-solve mysteries, real as well as fictional.  The detective must recognize a clue as having a sideways, non-obvious entry into revelation of the truth of the crime / puzzle.  This recognition factor is the power behind the lateral approach.  This skill is the soul of the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

Lateral analysis over AI

“As AI is getting smarter, young college grads may be getting dumber.  They can regurgitate information and ideas but struggle to come up with novel insights or analyze issues from different directions.  They don’t learn how to think through, express, or defend ideas,” says Allysia Findley in The Wall Street Journal.  Fluid recognition is key to what humans are good at, even though we don’t always allow ourselves to flex that imaginative power.  We prefer the safety of vertical thinking one step at a time, each building on the last.  We also prefer well-defined problems, meaning those that are so straightforward that the answer is contained in the question itself.  Think of the way an algebra problem lays out X, the unknown, so that the rest of the equation can work up the solution from the knowns.  

But a lateral exercise in problem definition is in riddles, where the reworking of language as word definition and re-defining holds the solution.   Here’s one for kids: “What is always coming, but never arrives?”  Answer: Tomorrow.  “Arriving” happens in time, not space.

 

Solution: The lines extend beyond the framework of the square, which is the only way the solution can be achieved—by thinking outside the box.  There was no rule stating that this method is not allowed.  The restriction is only a mental one.  Or a cultural barrier so thick that we don’t even realize it’s there. 

Sideways Intelligence: Lateral thinking

 

Photo: Pixabay

“Lateral knowledge is knowledge that is from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that is not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.”

 -- Robert Pirsig, writer and philosopher

 

Here is a minimal-information problem, challenging assumptions about the possible. 

A man living in a 30-story building decides to jump from his living-room window.  After doing                this, he survives the fall with no injuries.  How could this happen? 

Answer:  Although the man may live in a tall building, he jumped from a first-floor window.  No problem at all.  His fall and the building’s height aren’t related.

Puzzles

Another classical lateral thinking puzzle involves a driver and three potential passengers.  On a windy stormy night, you are driving your two-seater car in the far suburbs when you spot three people waiting at a bus stop outside the city.  One is an old lady looking like she is about to die.  One is a friend who once saved your life.  The third is the perfect romantic partner you’ve been dreaming about for years.  Your car can take just one passenger.  Who gets a ride from you? 

This scenario challenges your assumptions.  It looks as though you will be forced to let people down by excluding two of the three from your car.  But how about rethinking your assumptions – that you must pick up just one passenger?  Maybe you don’t have to pick one at all – just speed up and keep on driving past.  But that creates a social problem as well as leaving behind social capital to be mined. 

However, there is an answer in the lateral (side-ways) direction.  How about this: give your car keys to your important friend and ask him to drive the old lady to a hospital or help center.  This allows you to maximize the crisis in seating space by waiting with the perfect partner potential to catch the next bus together, with ample opportunity to chat and connect. 

By flexing the requirements of the situation, an elegant solution is allowed to emerge.  Taking this advantage is an example of sideways intelligence—a turnaround of the vertical, straight-on mode.  Now you can consider other “irrelevant” potentials looking 360 degrees to think about definitions and relationships you might not have thought about before.  As in another classic puzzle, “Would you jump from an airplane?”  “Question:  Is the airplane parked on the ground, or in flight?”  Not too different from the high-rise question above. Such minimal-information questions are typical of the Wally problem-solving test, which assesses children’s ability to solve problems using indirect approaches.

Lateral thinking, developed by psychologist Edward de Bono, involves examining problematic situations from unexpected angles to discover unsuspected creative solutions (The Use of Lateral Thinking, 1967).  Rather than following the logic of “vertical thinking,” each step following from the last in sequence, it approaches things from the outside, from other domains, entering from the side (lateral dimension).  Lateral thought does this by eclectically gathering ideas from outside the box, seeing what might be productive solutions by looking at other fields with far off-center definitions and associations.  De Bono termed this ability “displacement,” meaning to shift perspective to reveal an entirely new landscape of possibility.  He has cited the exemplar case of King Soloman from the Old Testament.  Faced with two women who each claimed a baby was theirs, the king proposed cutting the child in half—and revealed the true mother, who offered to give up her claim in order to save him.   

Examples

As one example, Uber rideshare was not developed by taxi companies.  It was the outcome of looking at consumer needs, computer programming, and cars and the drivers who owned them as a giant untapped resource. At a conference in Paris where taxis were hard to find, Travis Kalanick asked himself why this resource couldn’t be leveraged to the advantage of both passenger and driver. Uber didn’t own a single taxi and had nothing but criticism to offer as knowledge of the taxi business.   Another instance is that YouTube was originally launched as a dating site through home films.  And this: the Jacuzzi water massage tub was a therapy device until it was recognized and positioned as a luxury in-home spa. 

When Art Fry at 3M “discovered” Post-it notes, he was taking a failed experiment in adhesives that the company considered a failure.  He fiddled with the potential of some hard-to-attached but easy to detach slips of paper to explore their potential.  Then he explored the potential of his own situation in 3M, which involved the secretarial ranks.  He began to distribute these “loose adhesion” products around the office, and the clerical staff did the rest, making proof of concept up front for an accidental product.  With the usefulness of these notes established, it was then quick work to sell the concept to upper management, which greenlighted this famous invention to let it loose on the world.  What would we do without our Post-its?  Go back to paper clips holding paper scraps?

Disney’s Imagineering team created a completely novel public artform that was first conceived by Walt as a travelling educational museum of American folklore and heroes.  There was no precedent for it, and it did not derive from the amusement park model, which Disney despised and succeeded at replacing with a new-school idea.  Theme parks have far more to do with animation and filmmaking than with the carnival midway.    

Challenging assumptions is not only good therapy for the mind and the boardroom.  It is a way forward by indirection, “from the side,” a new route forward that can open vistas for problem-solving that have not been tried.  Disney’s Imagineering team called this blue-sky thinking, and it has been a model for creativity enhancement for thousands of organizations since the 1950s when practiced at the Burbank studios.  It turns out that avoiding straight-forward thinking has many benefits just not visible from the vertical-thinking perspective. 

Lateralism takes “outside” information inside to provoke a new but not yet stable structuring of the situation—the solution isn’t yet clear or determined.  Only then does this thinking attempt to develop outside insight into a solution that is fitting and actionable.  The highly popular “I Love Lucy” reversed the paradigm of the sitcom: the unruly husband fighting for control with a sensible wife.  Instead, Lucille Ball was the chaotic (but charming) wife at odds with Desi Arnaz as the voice of reason--switching the character of their real-life relationship). 

“Themeatics: The Art of Hyperreality” JPC, February-April 2025.

 Image: Statue of Liberty at New York New York hotel casino in Las Vegas

                                                        (Photo: J.G. O’Boyle)

Abstract

Since Disney Imagineering introduced the theme park in 1955, themeatics has ruled public space, becoming a mixed reality of virtual and nonvirtual, media and built design, as hyperreality. This “unified field theory” of the arts consolidates many styles and disciplines as mixed media, conferring meaning and engaging attention in immersive experiences that readily embody innovation. Through hyperreality, themeatics works as the dominant aesthetic now merging imagination with the experienced world. The fit between art-informed places like theme parks and the brain expands the life of the mind in culture through the scope of lived and virtual experience alike.

King, M. J. (2025). Themeatics: The art of hyperreality. Journal of Popular Culture, 58 (1-2), 7-25.

Table of contents

link to JPC article